Japanese Scene

Painted by Robert Blum in the years around his 1890-1892 residence in Japan, Japanese Scene is one of the smaller oil sketches that record his immediate response to Meiji urban life. The painting depicts a Japanese figural group in an outdoor setting — a temple precinct or street — handled in the broad, fluent manner that Blum reserved for his on-the-spot studies, with brilliant accents of red and pale blue against the warm browns of the wooden architecture and the figures' kimono. The handling is closer to a watercolour wash than to the carefully built-up surfaces of the Cincinnati Silk Merchant or the Met Ameya, suggesting that the canvas was painted in a single sitting either in Japan or in the New York studio in the months immediately following Blum's return.

The painting belongs to the body of small-format works that Blum produced as preliminary studies for his more ambitious Japan canvases and which entered the secondary market after his death without the documentation that attaches to the museum-held pictures; the canvas has been recorded at Bonhams in the modern period. Together with the larger paintings, the small Japanese sketches confirm Blum's working method of constant outdoor study from the Tokyo streets and his commitment to a directness of observation that distinguishes his Japan period from the studio-bound japonisme of most of his American contemporaries.